Many multimedia content formats facilitate the implementation of one or more trickplay features (e.g., pause, fast-forward, fast-reverse, skip, seek, etc.) in the presentation of the associated multimedia content. For other multimedia content formats, however, one or more of these trickplay features may be unavailable for other multimedia streams, either as a result of an intended disabling of certain trickplay features for digital rights management (DRM) purposes or due to an inherent technical limitation of the format, encoding technique, or the manner in how or where the content is stored. To illustrate, if future content has not yet been received for multimedia program, a fast-forward trickplay feature necessarily cannot yet be implemented. It often is not apparent to a user as to which multimedia streams are enabled to support trickplay features and which are not so enabled.
Single-source implementations sometimes are configured to notify the user that a trickplay feature is unavailable for the presentation of the multimedia content in response to a user's attempt to initiate the trickplay feature. For example, certain digital versatile disk (DVD) players are configured so as to provide an icon for display at a television when the user attempts to initiate certain trickplay features during playback of a trickplay-disabled section of a DVD (e.g., when a user attempts to skip or fast forward through the presentation of the copyright notice that is often found at the start of a motion picture). The current focus in the delivery of multimedia content is the gathering of multimedia content from disparate sources and the presentation of such content in a unified and uniform manner through a set-top box or other device at a user's premises. Under this scheme, the user may not be aware of the source of the multimedia content or the manner of its encoding, formatting, or transmission and thus may not know which trickplay features are available as the user otherwise would if there was only a single source of multimedia content. This unified, uniform delivery of multimedia content therefore can exacerbate a user's confusion regarding whether trickplay features are available for a given multimedia stream. Such confusion can lead to user frustration when the user attempts to initiate an unavailable trickplay feature and does not observe the expected result. Accordingly, an improved technique for notifying a user of the availability of trickplay features would be advantageous.
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